There are dozens of committees and sub-committees working on competence ‘frameworks’ for the many disciplines within building engineering services and many are still years away from producing results, but employers cannot afford to wait, writes Rachel Davidson*.
We probably didn’t need the Grenfell Tower Inquiry to tell us that people and their decisions are among the biggest risk factors in construction projects. However, its report did make it explicit, and the Building Safety Act (BSA) has translated that into legal organisational responsibility.
The legislation makes it plain that employers are liable for ensuring the right competence is in the right roles at the right time, but that is not new. What is new is that the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has tightened the alignment between legislation and the Building Regulations to explicitly impose competence requirements on both individuals and organisations. This gives more clarity and oversight around how competence is defined, demonstrated and governed.
The Industry Competence Committee (ICC) and its 50 sector led groups continue to codify what competence looks like and how it can be demonstrated across the entire industry spectrum, but employers do not need to wait. If your current approach is robust—and you’re prepared to defend it—carry on. The BSR will recognise sound, working systems. For those uncertain, forthcoming outputs will offer a pool of good practice and some reassurance. But none of that diminishes employer responsibility.
It is reminiscent of the Approved Code of Practice (ACOP) approach: Follow it and you gain confidence; depart from it and you must be able to justify your method. The burden of proof, however, always remains with the employer if something goes wrong.
Stop and check
This means designing a system, if you don’t already have one, that allocates work only to competent people; that seeks out and addresses behavioural risks; and that treats competence as a governance issue, not just an HR checklist. Day-to-day behaviour, speaking up, challenging, pausing unsafe work – all that ultimately comes from employer culture and incentives.
This must also apply at those messy interfaces where disciplines meet. Who is competent to ensure the whole system works, not merely a specific element? Designers and contractors have a duty under the Act to not only make sure their work is compliant but so are the other elements that connect to it. If they are not sure, they need to stop and check, which usually involves going back to the original design and taking guidance where necessary.
While this can sound daunting, it shouldn’t be. Our industry has always been good at finding solutions to unexpected on-site challenges – work arounds – but the new part is that they must be able, if challenged, to show how they ensured these solutions were compliant, which requires evidence of competent work by competent people.
On sites across the country, contractors routinely make adjustments they believe are compliant—but those changes can drift beyond the original design intent. In doing so, they inadvertently become designers under the safety legislation, triggering competence implications and responsibilities. The rule of thumb is simple: stop if it goes beyond your competence, consult, and confirm you can install what was specified, the way it was specified.
There are also growing demands on supply chain companies to provide deeper design detail much earlier. Effectively, the level of detail previously required at RIBA Stage 4 is needed at Stage 3 to correlate with planning Gateway 2 for HRBs. We all need to catch up with this direction of travel which is seeing Stage 4 work being separated into specialised packages – and that has more implications for organisational competence.
Competence is a blend of Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours (SKEB); turning abstract aspirations into assessable practice. Organisations are challenged not only to set expectations for SKEB, but to measure and evidence them consistently across different occupations, and to adopt robust approaches for assessment.
Critically, competence is an outcome, not an input. Training matters, but what matters more is whether people do the things they are supposed to do in practice reliably, repeatedly, and under pressure. That shift from counting courses to verifying conduct requires an audit trail that stands up to regulatory and legal scrutiny.
One practical barrier to a wider competence culture is the shortage of further education (FE) infrastructure – although this is an issue that cuts across most technical sectors in the UK, but the solution is not to stop people working – that is not the intention of the legislation.
Supervised and supported
People should be competent for the tasks they are doing, but where they are not, they must be properly supervised and supported. This is part of defining organisational competence and, although it is taking time, the work on sector-based competence is hugely valuable and helpful to employers which is why BESA is so heavily involved.
We are producing targeted guidance through our Building Safety Act Advisory Group including a new Client’s Guide to the Building Safety Act to help them meet their organisational competence duties.
BESA is also leading work on scoping competence for the ductwork and ventilation hygiene sectors, which are among the most advanced frameworks, with refrigeration expected to follow faster because it has more established qualifications. The goal is to translate legislative challenges into employer led standards that are defensible in both regulation and law.
However, technically targeted checks and balances must also acknowledge the human aspect of all of this: Even good, talented people have bad days. The right system detects, contains and corrects errors quickly before they become systemic – recording where an individual mistake may not be part of a wider systemic problem, but might require some re-training or a knowledge refresh. Your system should be able to detect how much work proceeds before issues are escalated.
We also need to recognise how our complex, fragmented industry works at the commercial level. For example, how does the procurement model exacerbate competence issues and how can we prevent risk from being kicked down the supply chain to parties whose competence you can no longer verify?
Practical Steps Every Employer Can Take Now
Competence is not a tick box exercise; it is a continuous management discipline that blends technical rigour with good behaviour to achieve compliance – and many employers in our sector are already doing these things as well as employing excellent people keen to do a good job.
Competence must also be viewed as a dynamic, risk management process that is properly governed and continually reviewed, at every stage of project delivery because people are your biggest asset. However, if left unmanaged and unsupported they can easily become your biggest risk factor.
Have a competence system and be ready to defend it.
For more information on compliance with the Building Safety Act visit BESA’s Hub here.